Associate Professor Mathew Nicho

Dr. Mathew Nicho is an Associate Professor of Cybersecurity at Rabdan Academy, UAE, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at UQ Cyber, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Queensland, Australia. He teaches cybersecurity to defence and law enforcement personnel in the UAE while conducting government-commissioned research. He holds a Master’s (2004) and Ph.D. (2009) in IT from Auckland University of Technology (AUT), New Zealand, and has taught at universities in New Zealand, the UK, and the UAE, bringing a global perspective to his academic and research endeavors.

Dr. Nicho’s teaching excellence is recognized through the Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA, 2016) and four digital learning certifications from Blackboard Academy UK (2020–2021). He was nominated as an ‘Exceptional’ faculty member in 2018 and received the ‘Exceptional Faculty’ award in 2019. His research portfolio includes 70+ publications (72% as first author), spanning Q1–Q4 journals and conferences, with continuous research grants since 2014.

His recent industry-academic collaborations include a technical report on cybersecurity in the UAE’s financial sector, conducted in partnership with ADGM Academy and the University of Queensland, as well as a collaboration with Abu Dhabi Police on crime prediction. As an industry speaker with multiple media interviews, Dr. Nicho has forged strong and ongoing connections with the IT security industry.
A dedicated academic, Dr. Nicho has supervised numerous Ph.D. and MSc theses, resulting in joint publications. His research interests lie at the intersection of cybersecurity, attacks on national critical infrastructure, machine learning, and situational cybercrime criminology, and digital learning, ensuring a strong alignment between academic theory and industry practice.